3 Collaborate Sessions PS Teams Need to See | Wrike

Efficiency is one of the main reasons why Wrike professional services are called in to help organizations of every size. The Wrike PS experts regularly find themselves helping organizations in a wide variety of fields and industries as they try to reach their team’s full potential for modern work efficiency.

Collaborate 2023 was designed as the perfect place for professional services teams to hear insights, integrations, and interactions to learn how to tackle challenges and thrive in a tough economy.

On that note, we’ve curated a round-up of all the can’t-miss sessions for professional services teams. Here’s a peek into three exciting professional services talks that happened at Collaborate 2023.

1. Unlock Insights With Wrike’s Charts and Dashboards — Shannon Riley and Margaret Gibbs

Overview

In this session, Shannon Riley, Industry Principal for Marketing, and Margaret Gibbs, Professional Services Consultant, introduced Wrike’s new visualization features, including charts and dashboards. The presenters discussed how these features can provide benefits such as rapid trend identification, enhanced data understanding, improved decision making, and customized reporting.

The presenters also provided best practices, including using template widgets, setting user filters, combining data sources, using drag and drop, and adding chart views to blueprints. Overall Wrike’s new visualization capabilities provide actionable insights, increase productivity, and offer organizations a competitive advantage.

Key takeaways

Independently analyze data without relying on IT or data experts
Create unified views using the pre-built templates and widgets in dashboards
Dynamically display assigned work and combine data from multiple folders and spaces

2. Optimize Your Resources With Wrike Skills Management — Richard Blatcher and Kristian Truelsen

Overview

The next PS-inspired session was led by Richard Blatcher and Kristian Truelsen, both solutions leaders at Wrike. They provided a comprehensive introduction to Wrike’s new skills management feature, designed to effectively manage and optimize resources based on specific skills.

The presenters also demoed Wrike’s new skills management in action, including how admins can assign proficiency grades to users. They provided best practices to optimize resources, manage teams, and ensure the right skills are in place at the right time.

Key takeaways

Integrating digital footprints across platforms for holistic campaigns
The essence of storytelling in brand representation
Maximizing Wrike’s platform for real-time campaign analytics and iterative feedback
Crafting content that aligns with both brand ethos and audience expectations
Methods to foster organic growth and brand loyalty in saturated markets

3. Swiss Army Wrike: Find New ROI With Efficient Ticketing — Joyce Campos, Matt Allen, and Cari Slocum

Overview

The session discussed how Sonny’s Enterprises, LLC leveraged Wrike as a ticketing management solution for handling website update requests.

Joyce Campos, Web Specialist at Sonny’s Enterprises, LLC, joined Wrike’s own Matt Allen, Principal IT Architect, and Cari Slocum, Senior Solution Consultant, and highlighted the challenges of depending solely on email for ticketing amidst a growing customer base.

Cari demonstrated how Wrike’s custom item types can capture input fields, assign urgency levels, and provide cross-team visibility through charts. Ultimately, Wrike provided a versatile ticketing solution without the need for an additional platform.

Key takeaways

Relying solely on email for ticketing can result in delays and communication gaps
Custom item types can encourage collaboration among teams
Wrike benefits include faster response times, easier coverage, and more visibility

Welcoming you all to Collaborate

Our favorite part of Collaborate 2023 was seeing all our attendees engaging with the platform and the sessions.

We can’t wait to see you at our next work management conference — in the meantime, you’re welcome to watch Collaborate 2023 back with our on-demand sessions. Whether you were there in real time and want to rewatch something or you couldn’t make the live event, head here for on-demand access to Collaborate.

See you next year!

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How to Use Wrike for Goal-Setting and Tracking

The end of the quarter (and another year) means it's that time again: time to set new goals. Not just annual business goals, but also quarterly goals, monthly goals, and especially personal new year resolutions. One part of your mission when setting goals for your company, departments, or teams should be to share those established goals with the rest of the company. It will let everyone know what direction they should be rowing. If you're already working in Wrike, you and your team can also use it to create visibility into established goals and track progress on the way to achieving them. Building Annual Plans in Wrike Annual planning is an essential part of a successful business. It provides direction for the entire organization, defines what teams will focus energy on, and synchronizes activities of different departments to maximize resources. But in order to do all that efficiently, the entire company needs visibility into the annual plans. You can build annual plans in Wrike following our suggestion, or using your own format. Our recommendation: Create a folder called "2016 Annual Plans" at the top level of your account and right-click the folder name to share it with the entire company. Inside that folder, create project folders or tasks for all of the different priorities and big initiatives of the year. You can assign responsible directors or managers to the work, so everyone knows who to talk to if they have questions about that objective. From there, you can drill down into immediate key actions by building out tasks, setting deadlines, and assigning the steps to the appropriate parties. Finally, use Custom Fields to make notes on budgeting — data in Custom Fields can be restricted to only show for certain user groups in your account, so your private information stays that way. If you don't have access to Custom Fields, just write information you'd like to share with the entire team in your task descriptions. Establishing Quarterly Plans in Wrike Since quarterly plans only cover 3 months instead of an entire year, it's easy to brainstorm new ideas right in Wrike. On the Wrike content marketing team, we create a project folder called something like "Q2 Ideas", and then individuals on our team can create a new task for every idea they have inside that folder. Inside their task descriptions, team members can add pertinent details if their idea requires a more detailed breakdown, or they've suggested a completely new undertaking and they've already thought out a majority of the work and substeps needed to make the idea a reality. This method of brainstorming and sharing also allows our team to see if someone else has had a similar idea, so we can combine efforts and dump our parallel brainstorms into one big task. After everyone has input their ideas, we have a meeting to vet those ideas for go-no go decisions. We project the "Q1 Ideas" folder onto the big screen in our meeting room, and then discuss all of the propositions as a group. We can assign task owners and schedule due dates for ideas we definitely want to proceed with; defer ideas we think are good for a future quarter; or cancel tasks that just aren't in line with our overall vision. Once we decide what ideas we're moving forward with, we reorganize those tasks into our main work folder structure, and build out complete project plans with subtasks for the big ideas. Tracking Progress Using OKRs If you're someone who loves quantifying goals and hitting numbers, consider implementing OKRs and using project tracking tools to monitor progress. "OKRs" stands for "Objectives and Key Results." It's a system for setting goals (Objectives) and the steps necessary to achieve those goals (Key Results), popularized by Google. It's something we do at Wrike. You can set up an OKR like this: O: Publish regularly on blog KR: Write at least 3 blog posts every week KR: Research 10 new post ideas at least once per week KR: Build a backlog of 10 posts to publish later when inspiration fails Notice how the Objective is broad, and the Key Results are more direct supporting steps toward reaching that goal. You can read all about OKRs in our post on using OKRs for quarterly planning. In the meantime, here are a few quick tips on OKR creation: Start every O and KR with a verb. This ensures they are actionable. Make sure every KR includes a number. This ensures it is a measurable action that you can finally mark as complete. Make sure your goals are slightly out of reach. They shouldn't be laughably hard to attain, but if you make them just a little more difficult than you typically would, it will inspire you to work harder to go the distance. We wrote an entire post detailing exactly how you can implement the OKR system at your company using Wrike. Take a look. Setting Personal Goals Using Wrike It can't always be about work, work, work! Every person should set some personal improvement goals to help maintain that work-life balance. When you decide on what yours will be, track them where you're already tracking the rest of your work — in Wrike! You can create a private folder at the top level of your Wrike account that no one else will be able to see. Turn each of your resolutions into a task, and if you know what it will take to turn those resolutions into a reality, break down those steps into subtasks. Create recurring tasks for things you know you'll need to do every week to reach your goal, assign them due dates for the end of each week, and mark them as complete as you make progress. Are you one of those people who never knows what to set for your New Year's Resolution? Here are some examples of what Wrikers are aiming to improve in 2016: Practice a new language at least 3x week using the Duolingo app Get better at doing Read 10 business-related improvement books Volunteer at the dog shelter at least 1x per month Keep one plant alive all year Reconnect with old friends Using Wrike for Goal-Setting Are you using Wrike to set and track your goals? Tell us your story and share how it has helped keep you on track in the comments below! If you have questions about best practices for goal-setting in Wrike, ask away in the comments and we'll get back to you with our advice.

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Collaborate 2023: Hand-Picked Sessions for PS Teams

1. Unlock Insights With Wrike’s Charts and Dashboards — Shannon Riley and Margaret Gibbs

Overview

Key takeaways

2. Optimize Your Resources With Wrike Skills Management — Richard Blatcher and Kristian Truelsen

Overview

Key takeaways

3. Swiss Army Wrike: Find New ROI With Efficient Ticketing — Joyce Campos, Matt Allen, and Cari Slocum

Overview

Key takeaways

Welcoming you all to Collaborate

Morgan Jones

Related articles

Do More With Less: Wrike Is Ready to Help You Thrive

How to Use Wrike for Goal-Setting and Tracking

Wrike in Action: Check Out Our Uniquely Powerful Customization

Collaborate 2023: Hand-Picked Sessions for PS Teams

1. Unlock Insights With Wrike’s Charts and Dashboards — Shannon Riley and Margaret Gibbs

Overview

Key takeaways

2. Optimize Your Resources With Wrike Skills Management — Richard Blatcher and Kristian Truelsen

Overview

Key takeaways

3. Swiss Army Wrike: Find New ROI With Efficient Ticketing — Joyce Campos, Matt Allen, and Cari Slocum

Overview

Key takeaways

Welcoming you all to Collaborate

Morgan Jones

Related articles

Do More With Less: Wrike Is Ready to Help You Thrive

How to Use Wrike for Goal-Setting and Tracking

Wrike in Action: Check Out Our Uniquely Powerful Customization

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